The golden age of TV is full of despicable leading men, and it seems like the more horrible they were, the more the audience loved them. And in this arms race to create the most morally compromised protagonist, FX took the cake with Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) in “The Shield.” In an oral history of one of the best TV crime dramas of all time in Entertainment Weekly, series creator Shawn Ryan recounted how the creative team wanted to test the audience’s sympathies by introducing an antagonist who rightly called out Mackey for the monster that he is.
Enter Forest Whitaker’s Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh from Internal Affairs and his righteous crusade to expose Mackey’s long list of crimes. Recalling his thinking at the time, Ryan said, “Well, this could be a real moral dilemma for the audience, because Kavanaugh’s right that Vic has done all these things.” But what they didn’t expect was that the audience was so in the bag for Vic that they’d turn on Kavanaugh instantly.
Michael Chiklis recalled Whitaker coming to set one day while they were filming, describing him as “just despondent, dismayed … He’s like, ‘They love you and hate me. You’re a murderer!'” Whitaker was rightly disturbed by how blinded the audience was by Vic’s charisma, which Chiklis said make him relatable despite his moral failings. “Obviously he’s gregarious, and outwardly he’s got that cockiness and bravado, and a certain level of charm in that,” he explained.
If Vic Mackey was an anti-hero, then Jon Kavanaugh was an anti-villain
In an interview with IGN, Ryan mused that an audience can become so accustomed to having a character like Vic Mackey in their lives that they will “make excuses for his behavior” simply because of how long they’ve followed his story, not unlike an abusive relationship. To try and counteract this, Ryan and the show’s writers went out of their way to write Whitaker’s scenes from the perspective of a good guy taking down a criminal. “And yet the audience members just couldn’t help but root for Vic to get out of it,” said Ryan, adding, “[I]f Vic Mackey was an anti-hero [then] Forest was playing an anti-villain.”
Whitaker, for his part, realized it was his job to be hated on the show, as baffling as it may be. “[P]eople are so in love with Vic and so in love with what Michael did in that character that any threat to him that’s a real threat that comes in, they want to stop it,” he said. Those fans got their wish, with Kavanaugh losing his battle with Mackey and ending up in prison, but the last laugh came in the show’s incredible series finale. Mackey seemed to have won out over everyone, avoiding jail and outrunning all his enemies, only to discover his new gig at ICE was nothing more than a desk job.
Whether you loved him or hated him (or felt a little bit of both), seeing him trapped like a lion in a cage was the worst fate of all for our anti-hero.
